"I always look at my work as trying to measure the distance between American promise and American reality," Springsteen says. "And I think (Obama's) inspired a lot of people with that idea: How do you make that distance shorter? How do we create a more humane society? We've lived through such ugly times that people want to have a romance with the idea of America again, and I think they need to."The hard realities and how things get done are important, too, but if you can effectively convince people that it's possible to make things better, they get excited."